Elizabeth Buhe Sculpted Glyphs: Egypt and the Musée Charles X Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 13, no. 1 (Spring 2014) Citation: Elizabeth Buhe, “Sculpted Glyphs: Egypt and the Musée Charles X,” in Elizabeth Buhe et al., “Sculpted Glyphs: Egypt and the Published by: Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art. Notes: This PDF is provided for reference purposes only and may not contain all the functionality or features of the original, online publication. Buhe: Sculpted Glyphs: Egypt and the Musée Charles X Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 13, no. 1 (Spring 2014) Sculpted Glyphs: Egypt and the Musée Charles X by Elizabeth Buhe Passing through Paris in 1815 on his way to take up his post as British consul-general in Cairo, Henry Salt (1780–1827) observed the forced restitution of the spoliated Greek and Roman antiquities that had been seized in 1797 from the Papal States by General Bonaparte.[1] He wrote from Geneva on October 7, 1815: Nothing has produced so strong a sensation among the French as the taking away of the pictures and statues from the Louvre. This very sensible and politic measure has rendered the malignant part of the populace perfectly furious, as it at once lowers their pride in the face of the world, and will serve as an everlasting testimony of their having been conquered.[2] As Salt noted, the French were profoundly affected by this sudden loss; Paris had in a matter of months fallen from its preeminent place as the symbolic center of history. A void—a wound, even—was left in classical antiquity’s place. History had been given material form in the Greco- Roman sculptures, which also signified the height of artistic production and the most advanced aesthetic notions of the time. The void, then, was not only visibly manifest in the emptied galleries of the Louvre, but also conceptually rooted in the disappearance of the illustrious classical past that had been appropriated for the French nation. By penning these words in 1815 and mitigating the sentiment they expressed by later selling to the French crown the largest of the three collections he amassed in Egypt, Salt aligns the return of the Bourbon monarchy and the contingencies of its historical moment with a broadly- conceived reexamination of history, and of Egypt specifically. Beginning less than a decade after the departure of the classical papal collection, France purchased three major Egyptian collections in relatively quick succession: that of Edmé-Antoine Durand in 1824, Salt in 1826, and Bernardino Drovetti in 1827.[3] However, in 1821, just three years before the Durand purchase, the Louvre rejected a large and important Egyptian collection, an incident that speaks to the tentativeness with which this new understanding of history was being constructed: at that date, a reconceptualization of history vis-à-vis Egypt was not yet possible. With the arrival of these Egyptian antiquities in Paris, Egypt was substituted for Greece. It was a tall order for the Egyptian antiquities to meet the prestige and art-historical value of the repatriated classical artworks they replaced. Yet the terms upon which Egyptian works of art could be understood, both as historical documents and archaeological or fine art objects, had not yet been determined, nor had the very conditions for viewing them. One writer noted that these Egyptian artifacts changed the character of the Louvre: “in effect, the Museum can no longer be considered a temple of Fine Arts, but has also become that of letters and of history, a mass of customs, uses, Religions, and the science of antiquity that will there be reunited.”[4] Something fundamental about the role of the museum, and indeed of history, seemed to be changing. 5 Buhe: Sculpted Glyphs: Egypt and the Musée Charles X Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 13, no. 1 (Spring 2014) The Musée Charles X, a museum of Greco-Roman and Egyptian antiquities housed within the Louvre, stood at the center of this complicated matrix of historicism, nationalism, and museum politics.[5] A royal decree of May 15, 1826 established its two separate sections and accorded four galleries for the display of each ancient civilization within an enfilade of the Cour Carrée’s south wing (fig. 1).[6] Scholar Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) was appointed curator of the Egyptian division, a position he held from 1827 until his death. There, he determined the terms on which ancient Egypt would be presented to the French public for the first time, and he did so through a complex and highly-ordered display that was broadly thematic by gallery—two funerary rooms, a room of civil life, and a room of the gods—and contained chronological series within these thematic divisions. Fig. 1, Map of second floor of the Louvre indicating location of the Musée Charles X’s Egyptian galleries. © Elizabeth Buhe. [larger image] Champollion developed a theory of Egyptian art that was reflected both in the Musée Charles X and in the pages of his written works. Despite his curatorial work, he must first be considered a linguist and a historian; indeed, it was because of his decipherment of hieroglyphics in September 1822 that he had risen to prominence. The key to understanding ancient Egyptian writing had come with Champollion’s realization that hieroglyphic text (specifically the text outside cartouches, which hold the names of Egyptian royalty or deities) could be read phonetically rather than pictorially.[7] His expertise therefore lay in the structures of language and the conveyance of meaning through a complex web of numerous constituent parts, and his ideas about Egyptian sculpture were thus cross-disciplinary and heavily influenced by his understanding of Egyptian writing. (Until his death, he continued to return to and revise his work on hieroglyphic script as inscriptions on newly discovered monuments became available.) While this aesthetic aspect of his writing has heretofore been overshadowed by the controversy and competition surrounding the decipherment, Champollion’s theory of Egyptian art and its influence on his curatorial strategy deserves considered analysis: with his newfound ability to read the inscriptions on Egyptian antiquities, he brought the empirical thrust of the eighteenth century to bear on Egyptian history and, as a result, on its art. In this article, I aim to provide a historical context and interpretative framework for the Musée Charles X as it existed during Champollion’s lifetime and to demonstrate that Champollion’s 6 Buhe: Sculpted Glyphs: Egypt and the Musée Charles X Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 13, no. 1 (Spring 2014) theory of Egyptian sculpture undergirded his display of Egyptian antiquities in the museum. I therefore focus solely on those aspects of Champollion’s approach to ancient Egypt that were freely conceptualized by him alone. Many other studies have treated the official apparatus of the Louvre and its administrators, including the politics and reception of the Musée Charles X’s ceiling paintings and décor.[8] Because Champollion was often at odds with his colleagues at the Louvre, his intellectual and curatorial approach is best understood when treated in a way that recognizes his as a singular perspective within a heterogeneous environment of competing voices. The theory of Egyptian art that Champollion postulated was in critical dialogue with preceding and contemporaneous archaeologists, art theorists, and art historians, including Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) and Raoul Rochette (1790–1854). Most important among these thinkers, however, is Antoine Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy (1755–1849), one of the most prolific and influential art writers of his time. Quatremère had gained particular notoriety early in his career after winning the essay competition for the Prix Caylus of 1785 with a submission later republished under the title De l’architecture égyptienne considérée dans son origine, ses principes et son goût, et comparée sous les mêmes rapports à l’architecture grecque (1803), which advanced scholarship on Egyptian architecture and made Quatremère one of the foremost authorities on Egyptian art.[9] Because he wrote much more extensively on aesthetic questions than Champollion, Quatremère’s is an important voice, complementing and sometimes serving as a foil to Champollion’s theories. While Champollion’s views diverged from those of his predecessors concerning the static nature of Egyptian artistic production, he agreed with the traditional view that Egyptian art failed to engage with the concept of the beau idéal, that synthesis of perfect forms unattainable in nature that was later perfected by the Greeks. Whereas for others this was a shortcoming warranting the dismissal of Egyptian art from the aesthetic canon, for Champollion, requiring the beau idéal from Egyptian art was simply a misguided application of a conceptual model devised for works of art made under wholly different conditions. He posed methodological questions about bringing to bear ideas “contrary to reason and to fairness each time one judges Egyptian art by taking the terms of appreciation . of the Greeks, which is to say those of a people entirely foreign to Egypt, not only by physical constitution but also by their customs, their political institutions, and their habits.”[10] Filtering Egyptian sculpture through Egyptian linguistic structures provided a way for Champollion to challenge the claims that Egyptian art was inferior by those who viewed it through a lens created to promote the moral and intellectual superiority of Greek sculpture. Given the insufficiency of existing structures of aesthetic valuation, Champollion turned toward both linguistics and science for guidance. In other words, Champollion was not reorienting Winckelmannian aesthetics to understand Egyptian art, but instead appropriating the language and interpretative methods of alternative disciplines. It is notable that the two publications containing Champollion’s clearest articulations of his theory of Egyptian art both date to the same year, 1824: his Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens égyptiens, and the first of his Lettres à M.